Meet Wrinkles, he’s a 65-year-old military veteran and retiree, and he is here to help. For a small fee, he’ll show up at your event, but recently he’s stumbled upon a lucrative side business: disciplining your coulrophobic kid until they’re too terrified to be defiant.
As per The Washington Post, Wrinkles said that he was recently hired by a mother who was fed up with her misbehaving 12-year-old:
“He was scared of clowns and I showed up across the street from him at the bus stop and he just started crying in front of his friends and ran home… His mother called back a few days later and said ‘Thank you!’ Now when he acts bad, she just has to ask him: ‘Do you want Wrinkles to come back?’”
Is Wrinkles a really scary? No, Wrinkles is actually a pretty friendly guy, and he mostly just sees clowning as a way to “have a little bit of fun before.” But there’s a creepy look of him, between his weird red onesie, holes-for-eyes mask and stoic wave. That’s why he’s so effective as a disciplinary tool. As an adult, we see Wrinkles is still pretty terrifying, so you can just imagine what it might feel like to see him wave at you standing with balloons across the street from where you live as a child.
But is it the right way to discipline your child – capitalizing on your child’s fears — in this case, clowns — to “fix” their bad behavior? The fact is, negative reinforcement, while it seems like an easy answer and is undeniably a satisfying choice, is typically a temporary fix. Discipline is usually more effective when you don’t inject serious negativity into it. The reality is that most parents don’t have the patience to keep it up for very long.
But being realistic, you will probably have to use the threat of negative consequences to get your kid get disciplined. However, it may be better to just let those consequences be the natural byproduct of their poor choices. That way, it’s not even really threatening; it’s just a life lesson. If your child refuses to do their homework, they’ll get bad grades. If they get bad grades, they lose their privileges.
Sometimes the threat of that alone is enough to get your kids to self-correct. Sometimes they actually have to experience the horror of not being allowed to use their phone for a week before they get the picture.
However, when that doesn’t work, different time-outs may work, and when those doesn’t work either, Wrinkles may work!